bw123 wrote:I really didn't understand why the system journal was relevant. But the thought occurs, while sysV init is still available and working in jessie, have you thought about installing package sysvinit-core and seeing what happens?

“So you have paid attention to being or feeling off-course and you discern there is a problem. Now what? Uncover the precise problem. Think through what has happened and isolate the deviation from the intended course. In other words, what is it that veered you off course or kept you from succeeding?”

By eliminating systemd from the possible causes of the problem you can 'see' the remaining possible causes.

By using sysV init you may also get some more info in individual logs under /var/log and it seems to me that systemd does not log as much information from it's 'units' as sysV does.

“So you have paid attention to being or feeling off-course and you discern there is a problem. Now what? Uncover the precise problem. Think through what has happened and isolate the deviation from the intended course. In other words, what is it that veered you off course or kept you from succeeding?”

By eliminating systemd from the possible causes of the problem you can 'see' the remaining possible causes.

By using sysV init you may also get some more info in individual logs under /var/log and it seems to me that systemd does not log as much information from it's 'units' as sysV does.

I've been doing quite a bit of reading on this issue and it was first reports about 2 years ago. The cause of the problem is not apparent to me, or many people much smarter than me, but seems to be related to jobs not halting when sent the message to do so. Many of the posts blame the aggressive way that systemd shuts down jobs. I am not smart enough to have a clue, so I'm just babbling. Logging out prior to reboot/shutdown seems to avoid the issue. Not sure where to go with this. I've tried to incorporate some things, such as enabling debug, but don't see anything helpful. Guess I'll just move on from this and deal with it.

However, it is interesting that I didn't see this issue until after I upgraded to a newer motherboard with Intel i5 processor. Maybe an issue with Jessie i386 and this particular motherboard (Gigabyte GA-H81M-H). Stretch amd64 does not hang on reboot on this hardware. HMMMM !

“...[Y]ou discern there is a problem. Now what? Uncover the precise problem.”

(Emphasis added)

By eliminating systemd from the possible causes of the problem you can 'see' the remaining possible causes.

Your point is quite well-taken, of course. And you're quite correct in assessing that systemd is indeed a very likely culprit, and that deploying sysV would therefore likely fix the problem. The larger issue for this OP is that any systematic approach focused on finding a solution might actually succeed; consider one viable alternative...

dasein wrote:4) According to the bug report, yes, the bug is fixed. Is that fix available in jessie-backports?

And therein lies the real issue: some folks would rather wallow in a problem than fix it.

Thanks you Mr. Give-me-hell! Maybe I deserve it. I wasn't WALLOWING, I was relating an issue. And in fact I had read that report regarding bug 788303. I saw where the bug was fixed in the latest release of systemd, around 25 April 2016, and had ASSUMED since I had done a dist-upgrade many times sine that date that I had the latest version of systemd for jessie. However, on further examination I see that I have 215-17 and the fix was deployed at 229-5. Had I seen that, instead of WALLOWING, I would have looked at the jessie-backports.

Once again, thanks for being so helpful. Your empathy is sometimes overwhelming.

UPDATE: Well, I went ahead and used apt-get, as that is what I would normally use. Everything appears to be installed and working. I even went ahead and did an update-grub just to be sure that init d files were updated. Necessary, don't know but shouldn't hurt.I now have systemd 230. I'll keep my eyes on the shutdown issue and hopefully it is now resolved, thanks mostly to the ever helpful dasein. Thank you SIR!